There is an old story of Stalin visiting a school in Moscow and asking the clever kid, Boris: ‘Who killed Julius Caesar?’ Boris burst out crying, ‘Not me sir.’ A furious Stalin met the teacher and asked him to explain. The teacher, trembling, said, ‘Sir, I have looked into the matter and can confirm that, incredible though it may seem, Boris did not kill Julius Caesar.’ An exasperated Stalin called on the headmaster. But the headmaster's response was the same. Boris had not done it. And this continued—the same question being asked of different authorities, and the same answer. Finally, Stalin sent for the KGB chief and asked him to look into the matter. The following day, the chief returned to say, ‘Sir, the KGB has solved the problem. The boy has confessed.’

Has India's poverty, as measured by the percentage of people living below the poverty line, gone down during the 1990s? The same answer, no, for many years and then a sudden dramatic change, caused by a different method of calculation by India's National Sample Survey (NSS), seemed to have a strange parallel with the Stalin story.

Few economic debates have been as charged and murky as the one that tries to answer the question concerning India's poverty. For a lot of people (foolishly, in my opinion) the answer to this question is tantamount to an evaluation of the success or failure of the economic reforms that were started in 1991.